It’s versatile — In the beginning, Pidgin was designed as a way of using AOL Instant Messenger on Linux. From there, it branched off to support multiple different messaging services, such as IRC and XMPP. Fortunately for us, Pidgin supports extensions which when installed, allow us to modernize its functionality.

Some Caveats

Pidgin’s voice and video support are very limited. If you depend on using them, you may find them failing with Pidgin! While some Pidgin plugins work around this, not all of them do. Furthermore, while Pidgin does keep track of your future conversations, it won’t download ones from the past.

Getting Started

First things first, you’ll need to get Pidgin. Your Linux operating system may already have it by default. If not, enter this command to install it:

sudo apt-get install pidgin

After this is done, you can begin giving Pidgin some extra capabilities — MSN is not enough! Many of the plugins (namely, Hangouts, Telegram, and Skype) need to be installed through an unofficial repository.

When prompted to add an account to Pidgin, if you click of the Protocol option box, you’ll be able to select Skype (HTTP) as one of your options. All you have to do is enter your username and password and you’re all set.

Making Pidgin Work With Google Hangouts

Install the Hangouts third-party plugin with:

sudo apt-get install purple-hangouts

Getting Hangouts to work is a little more complicated than Skype, unfortunately.

As you can see, Hangouts doesn’t ask for a password in the traditional sense. Instead, Pidgin will open up your web browser, and give you directions from there. It’s a little bit complicated, but the video that plays when you set it up clear enough to follow.

Enter your phone number as your username. Keep in mind that you’ll need a + sign in front of your cellphone number, followed by your country code. For example, if you live in the United States, your username will need a +1 in front of it.

Like Hangouts, Telegram is a little more complicated to set up. Once you’ve added your account, you’ll receive an SMS code to your phone. Enter the code that pops up to log in.

How to Use Facebook Messenger With Pidgin

If you look at all the different protocols Pidgin supports, you’ll see an entry called Facebook (XMPP). In the past, this used to work, until Facebook changed their messaging service up. When Pidgin 3.0 is released, Facebook Messenger will work out of the box.

If you’re using an older version of Ubuntu, you might have to change the bold area of the command to get the right package. This means specifying the correct Ubuntu version. You can use the command below to check your version:

lsb_release -r

To manually verify that this provider is safe (when adding Ubuntu PPA repositories, this process is automatic), use following command:

wget -O- https://jgeboski.github.io/obs.key | sudo apt-key add -

Afterwards, proceed as usual with a command to look through the packages newly available:

sudo apt-get update

Finally, install the Messenger plugin for Pidgin:

sudo apt-get install purple-facebook

Thankfully, adding a Facebook account to Pidgin is a much easier process. There are no extra hoops to jump through. All you need to do is enter your username and password. Remember to choose the protocol called Facebook, not Facebook (XMPP)!